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2016-09-10

Clerk Note: To those who look to sky for patterns, 9/11 may have been literally written in the planets. Known cosmic dates, or operation deadlines known to all, or coincidence? For planning purposes, I can see this as convenient, but I don't see it as a "written in the stars as pre-ordained" kind of a thing.

2016-09-09

Clerk Note: This came through recently but without author, date, or source URL. When I tracked down a version of it (<100% identical) and saw it was 2014, I was deflated. Then I found some 2016 updates. Milking the cow, milking the process, taking their time, for something not all that revealing.

Fort Lauderdale U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch, a highly regarded federal judge ordered the FBI to conduct a more thorough search of its vast files to identify documents about its once secret investigation of terrorist activity in Sarasota prior to 9/11.The FBI wanted to have the case thrown out.

Prof who blamed Jews for 9/11 suspended from job

The controversial professor at ultra-liberal Oberlin College who sparked a national outcry after posting anti-Semitic rants and bizarre 9/11 conspiracy theories has been booted from the classroom, the school said Wednesday.

Joy Karega, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition, was put on paid leave while prestigious Oberlin College considers her future, according to a statement from university president Martin Krislov obtained by The Post.

Clerk Note: I don't know how much stock I should put into promises that Putin will eventually publish 9/11 secrets on 9/11. And why now? Maybe I should add a "disinformation" label. I once explained to the late Vatic Master that it was okay for the Vatic Project to re-publish blatant disinformation providing it is so labeled, and providing that the reader is aware that their duty is to look for nuggets of truth contained therein to preserve. So will it be for any 9/11 announcement from Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has named the date he plans to release proof that the US government and intelligence agencies were responsible for the “controlled demolition” of the World Trade Center in the 9/11 attacks.

Microsoft had an ambitious goal with the launch of Windows 10: a billion devices running the software by the end of 2018. In its quest to reach that goal, the company aggressively pushed Windows 10 on its users and went so far as to offer free upgrades for a whole year. However, the company’s strategy for user adoption has trampled on essential aspects of modern computing: user choice and privacy. We think that’s wrong.

You don’t need to search long to come across stories of people who are horrified and amazed at just how far Microsoft has gone in order to increase Windows 10’s install base. Sure, there is some misinformation and hyperbole, but there are also some real concerns that current and future users of Windows 10 should be aware of. As the company is currently rolling out its “Anniversary Update” to Windows 10, we think it’s an appropriate time to focus on and examine the company’s strategy behind deploying Windows 10.

Hillary Clinton & The Mysterious Death of JFK Jr.

Approaching the end of two terms in the White House, the Clinton’s began preparing for their political future. They focused their attention on developing Hillary as a politician (even though she had no actual experience), and selling influence while they had it…buy now, pay later…payable to what would become “The Clinton Foundation”. Hillary refused to return to Arkansas, and suggested the purchase of a home in New York which would allow her to run for the Senate in the upcoming election. There was just one obstacle…. JFK Jr. had entered the political scene. New York was electric with word of JFK Jr. reclaiming his fathers legacy! A piece of Camelot was still alive in America, and donors began to line up. She knew she could never defeat the son of JFK in New England.

IVN Poll: Nearly 8 in 10 Respondents Do Not Want to Vote for Trump or Clinton

IVN conducted a presidential poll from July 15-24 asking independent and independent-minded voters who they would vote for if the presidential election were held today. The results found that 78% of respondents would vote for a candidate other than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

Receiving nearly 32,000 responses, the IVN survey posed three questions to respondents: 1. If the election were held today, which presidential candidate would you vote for? 2. Of the listed candidates (4-way race), who would you approve of being the next president? 3. Which political party, if any, best represents your views?

A small core of super-rich individuals is responsible for the record sums cascading into the coffers of super PACs for the 2016 elections, a dynamic that harks back to the financing of presidential campaigns in the Gilded Age.

Close to half the money — 41 percent — raised by the groups by the end of February came from just 50 mega-donors and their relatives, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal campaign finance reports. Thirty-six of those are Republican supporters who have invested millions in trying to shape the GOP nomination contest — accounting for more than 70 percent of the money from the top 50.

Nuclear Waste Leaking at ‘American Fukushima’ in Northwest

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation sits on the plains of eastern Washington, where the state meets Oregon and Idaho. This is open country through which cars pass quickly on the way to the Pacific coast or, conversely, deeper into the heartland. The site is nearly 600 square miles in area and has been largely closed to the public for the past 70 years. Late last year, though, it became part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which will allow visitors to tour B Reactor, where plutonium for one of the two atomic weapons dropped on Japan in World War II was produced.

This was a hopeful turn for a place that, for four decades, stocked the American nuclear arsenal. A total of nine reactors operated at Hanford, and though they are now decommissioned, the reactors have left behind 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. That a place so tainted with radioactive material could become parkland was a positive sign.

Word Games: What the NSA Means by “Targeted” Surveillance Under Section 702

We all know that the NSA uses word games to hide and downplay its activities. Words like "collect," "conversations," "communications," and even "surveillance" have suffered tortured definitions that create confusion rather than clarity.

There’s another one to watch: "targeted" v. "mass" surveillance.

Since 2008, the NSA has seized tens of billions of Internet communications. It uses the Upstream and PRISM programs—which the government claims are authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—to collect hundreds of millions of those communications each year. The scope is breathtaking, including the ongoing seizure and searching of communications flowing through key Internet backbone junctures,[1]the searching of communications held by service providers like Google and Facebook, and, according to the government's own investigators, the retention of significantly more than 250 million Internet communications per year.[2]

Yet somehow, the NSA and its defenders still try to pass 702 surveillance off as "targeted surveillance," asserting that it is incorrect when EFF and many others call it "mass surveillance."

Clerk Note: Here's hoping that the Trump hoax destroys the Republican Party, the leaders who have been lock-step (if not goose-stepping) to be out-of-step with the population and their needs, particularly women but also minorities and the non-wealthy.

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The Long, Sad, Corrupted Devolution of the GOP, From Eisenhower to Donald Trump

But Donald J. Trump is not an accident. The GOP has in the last 40 years relentlessly devolved away from addressing the needs of ordinary people, catering instead to extreme ideologies and the wealthiest donors.

Top photo: President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon in 1952.

Clerk Note: Saw a short Facebook video involving 341 pennies, each representing 1 million US Citizens. It removes pennies for those too young to vote or not allowed to vote. It shows dramatically how small the two major parties are in representing the US, let alone the even smaller numbers that supposedly nominated the Republican & Democratic presidential candidates. 161 million US citizens did not vote for them. We already know about the disenfranchise games in the primaries.

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Vulnerable Voting Machine Raises Questions About Election Security

Computer security experts have warned for years that some voting machines are vulnerable to attack. And this week, in Virginia, the state Board of Elections decided to impose an immediate ban on touchscreen voting machines used in 20 percent of the state's precincts, because of newly discovered security concerns.

The problems emerged on Election Day last November in Spotsylvania County. The AVS WINVote touchscreen machines used in precinct 302 began to shut down.

"One machine would go and crash. They'd bring it back up. Another one would crash," said Edgardo Cortes, the state's elections commissioner. "Starting in the early afternoon, they brought in a piece of replacement equipment that experienced the same issues when they set it up in the precinct."

Cortes added that elections workers had a theory about what had caused the problem.

"There was some interference," he said, "potentially from a wireless signal from an election officer [who] was streaming music on their phone."

Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. It's a shiny video game for grown ups -- a Mortal Kombator Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.

The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved -- whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone -- the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument(drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.

The Rise of the Drones

The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001 in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under Obama, with an actual White House “kill list,” the use of drones has again expanded, this time nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones.

There’s an obvious appeal to a technology that allows pilots for the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, or the Air Force to sit safely in front of video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in the U.S., while killing people half a world away. This is especially true for a president running a global war with a public that does not easily accept American casualties and a Congress that prefers not to be responsible for war and peace decision-making. Drone assassinations have allowed President Obama to spread the “war on terror” to ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S. casualties or congressional oversight and approval.

Federal judge allows former CIA detainees to sue over torture

For the first time, a federal judge is letting a civil lawsuit proceed against two CIA contract psychologists who designed and supervised brutal interrogation tactics that critics called torture.

The ruling allows two former CIA detainees and the family of another who died in agency custody to try to win damages in federal court for the abuse they suffered at then-secret CIA prisons in the early 2000s.

In a ruling from the bench at federal district court in Spokane, Wash., Senior Judge Justin L. Quackenbush said he would deny a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

The Secret War Crime

By: Aryn Baker and Photographs by Lynsey Addario for TIME
Date: 2016-03

First they shot her husband. Then the soldiers killed her two sons, ages 5 and 7. When the uniformed men yanked her daughter from her hands next, Mary didn’t think it could get any worse.

Mary and her family were members of the Nuer tribe in South Sudan, caught up in a vicious power struggle between the new country’s President Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka tribe, and his Vice President, Riek Machar, a Nuer. Their war, fought largely along ethnic lines, has turned the northern part of the country into a wasteland. At least 50,000 people have been killed, according to the U.N., nearly 4 million face famine, and another 2.2 million have fled their homes, recounting tales of civilian slaughter, gratuitous torture and even forced cannibalism. Mary and her family were among the tens of thousands of civilians seeking refuge at a U.N. peacekeeping base in the northern city of Bentiu when they ran into Kiir’s forces on the road in June 2014.

The 27-year-old recounts what occurred next distantly, as if she were explaining something that happened to someone else. The soldiers told Mary that they considered the Nuers in the camps to be rebels, and that they killed her sons because they couldn’t risk letting them grow up to be fighters. “We don’t kill the women and the girls,” the soldiers told Mary. “They said they would only rape us. As if rape were different than death,” says Mary, speaking in a safe house in neighboring Uganda run by Make Way Partners, an American Christian organization that provides housing, medical care and schooling for South Sudanese orphans and victims of human trafficking. After the soldiers killed her husband and sons, five of them held her down and forced her to watch as three others raped her 10-year-old daughter. Her name was Nyalaat. When the men were done, Mary says, “I couldn’t even see my little girl anymore. I could only see blood.” Then the men took turns with Mary. Nyalaat died a few hours later. “I wanted to die too.”